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Sat, 30 Dec 2017 00:36:41 +0000PunBBhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2110&action=new
CoCo was a beautiful movie and if you didn't cry like a bitch you have a no soul.]]>Sat, 30 Dec 2017 00:36:41 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2110&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2109&action=new
What a year.

2017 is, without hyperbole, probably the best year for cinema this decade (though 2013—the year we saw Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Gravity, Short Term 12, and Upstream Color all hit theatres, is hard to beat). There have been so many truly great movies put out, and even more really good ones. Hell, I even liked two of its six superhero films, something that hasn’t happened for me since 2012. And not only have there been an abundance of great movies, so many of them have come from new, diverse perspectives.

So, what were your thoughts on the year in movies? Post your ranked lists, talk about specific releases, etc. Go nuts.

My own ranked list is below, spoilered because I saw 70 movies this year—all hail Moviepass! I have further thoughts on each of the films in my end-of-year writeup on my blog, but there's no way I was copying and pasting that much text. Indie movies were clearly the winner of the year, as were diverse and first-time directors—the two best-reviewed movies of the year, Lady Bird and Get Out, were both directorial debuts made on incredibly small budgets, the former written and directed by a woman and the latter by a black man. That's not to take away from directors like Darren Aronofsky and Christopher Nolan, who put out incredible work this year, but 2017 clearly belonged to new voices, which was thrilling to witness.

The Florida Project is the best of the year by a country mile—it's absolutely monumental, a spiritual experience that I can only compare to the first time I saw The Tree of Life. But where that film is cosmic in scale, this one embraces the transcendence of the utterly mundane as it follows a cast of fucked-up characters desperately trying to eke out a living in the pastel-encrusted slums on the outskirts of Disney World. By the final scene, it’s dragged you through the full spectrum of emotions and left you both numb and exhilarated, a window into eternity finally slamming closed. Breathtaking.

SPOILER Show

The Great1. The Florida Project2. Lady Bird3. mother!4. Dunkirk5. 20th Century Women6. John Wick Chapter 27. The Big Sick8. Free Fire9. Get Out10. Toni Erdmann11. Good Time12. In This Corner of the WorldThe Very Good13. Last Flag Flying14. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)15. Baby Driver16. Silence17. Paterson18. Star Wars: The Last Jedi19. Call Me By Your Name20. The Disaster Artist21. The Transfiguration22. A Cure for Wellness23. Logan24. The Shape of Water25. Icarus26. A Ghost Story27. The Beguiled28. Found Footage 3D29. Personal Shopper30. Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond31. The Killing of a Sacred Deer32. Imperial DreamsThe Good33. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets34. War for the Planet of the Apes35. Logan Lucky36. Coco37. Whose Streets?38. It39. Raw40. I Am Not Your NegroThe Mixed41. Brigsby Bear42. Blade Runner 204943. Molly's Game44. Wonder Woman45. Hidden Figures46. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri47. Detroit48. Atomic Blonde49. Mudbound50. It Comes at Night51. Lady Macbeth52. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore53. Manifesto54. Murder on the Orient Express55. Wonderstruck56. Song to Song57. Nocturama58. Okja59. All These Sleepless NightsThe Poor60. The Void61. Battle of the Sexes62. Darkest Hour63. Suburbicon64. The DiscoveryThe Godawful65. Woodshock66. Brawl in Cell Block 9967. The Book of Henry68. The Snowman69. Beauty and the Beast70. The Dark Tower

The setup of Robert Altman's 1984 picture Secret Honor is a simple one. Philip Baker Hall, as Richard Nixon, sits by himself in his office post-resignation, ranting into a tape recorder over the great betrayal that has been committed against him. For ninety minutes. That's it.

It's not hyperbole when I say that Hall's performance in this is one of the greatest in the history of cinema. For an hour and a half, he and he alone carries the movie. He rants, he raves, he slobbers and mewls, alternating between euphoric, delirious nostalgia and futile, towering rage. That he's coherent is a miracle in and of itself—Nixon is constantly stumbling over himself, stammering, and roaring, doing all the work of the collective cast of a David Mamet play, and Hall never once flubs his continuous rant (granted, this is a movie, but he originated the role in the stage version, delivering the same hysterical cry into the wind in one go night after night). But he's more than coherent, he's riveting. As Nixon Hall is at once a titanic, mythic figure and a pathetic, stunted little man. The more his histrionics go on the smaller he shrinks, as though the archetype of Tricky Dick is growing by leeching Nixon the man of his life-force. If Hall had tipped his hand too far to either extreme, his character would have utterly failed, too pitiful to hold our attention or too vast and broad to be taken seriously. The paradox he pulls off is astonishing.

I've seen this movie a couple of times, but I haven't revisited it since the election. When I do, I'm sure it'll resonate all the more. Nixon is obviously a precursor of Trump in many ways, the biggest of which is that Trump is living his own Secret Honor every day. The difference is that where this movie takes place in the seclusion of Nixon's home, Trump is staging his own dark night of the soul on Twitter for all the world to see.

I posted this because Secret Honor is currently available to watch for free on YouTube. I don't know how much longer that'll be the case, so do plunge in while you have the chance.

]]>Sat, 09 Dec 2017 01:59:17 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2103&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2092&action=new
I just saw it. Fuck, man. What a rush. Seeing good storytelling like that is like snorting a line of cocaine. Or several. Or whatever.

Blade Runner 2049 is a testament to Ridley Scott's ability to use light and composition to tell a story. The long, slow-burn of the pacing felt just like the original. Almost every frame could have been printed out and hung in a photography exhibit. Just beautiful work.

And while all that was super great, that's not what I loved about this movie. As far as visuals go, I really think that's the easy part. They've used the original as a template, and while this one was still brilliantly shot, it's imitative by nature.

To me, the performances were what won the day. I think anyone would have been able to just shoot visually "Blade Runner-esque" picture, throw in some Vangelis and call it a day. It was the subtle emotions of the characters, especially Ryan Gosling's K, that made this stand out as great.

(spoilers)

To be specific, I spent a large chunk of the movie going "please don't let him be Deckard's son. Please don't let him be Deckard's son". And he wasn't, and I was glad. What really got me was how K went from discovering he may have a family to having it all torn away from him. Instead that pain and sense of loss destroying him, he used it to give his life to get Deckard back to his daghter. And really, that's what the movie turned out to boil down to. In the end, we don't really know much about K. All we know is that he found his humanity and gave up everything to do the decent thing.

I was at the edge of my seat for pretty much the whole thing. My hat is off the Ridley. He's still got it.

Now he needs to put that much effort into making a decent Alien sequel.

Watching the Coen brothers’ rendition of True Grit is akin to watching something Shakespeare might have written, had Shakespeare been born in 19th-century America. There’s always a level of unreality to the dialogue in the Coens’ films, but True Grit is unique in just how bizarre its characters’ speech is. There is perhaps no better example of this than a jibe Rooster Cogburn, the drunken, grizzled U. S. marshal, makes at the expense of the foppish Texas Ranger LaBouef:

I’m struck that LaBoeuf has been shot, trampled, and nearly severed his tongue, and not only does not cease to talk but spills the banks of English.

The marshal scoffs at his companion’s highfalutin speech, yet he himself talks in a manner far above that of a redneck, near-illiterate Wild-West gunslinger; “severed,” “cease,” and “spills the banks” are not common turns of phrase in such circles. This commingling of high and low speech is the basis of another joke earlier in the film; Mattie Ross irritably informs Rooster, who’s attempted to leave her high and dry while he and LaBeouf seek out Tom Chaney:

And ‘futile’, Marshal Cogburn, ‘pursuit would be futile’? It’s not spelled ‘f-u-d-e-l.’

The world of the film’s script is one of blatant unreality. No matter a character’s education or station, they are capable of spouting verbiage that carries more poetic lilt in one line than most screenplays do in their entire text. They will likely as not, however, do so in a manner that’s as rife with vernacular turns of phrase and grammatical errors as Rooster’s correspondence with Mattie is rife with misspellings.

A large portion of this off-kilter speech originates not with the Coens but with Charles Portis, the author of the novel on which True Grit is based. Nonetheless, only the Coens could have pulled it off in a film setting with the kind of richness it deserves. Witness by comparison the 1969 True Grit film; it’s a decent Western for another cinematic day and age, but Portis’ words are as flat and clumsy in the mouths of its actors as one of Rooster’s corn dodgers. Whenever one of those absurdly elegant sentences is read, that’s what it feels like—a line reading and nothing more. When the actors in the 2010 True Grit speak their lines, it’s as though torrents of verbiage flow from their mouths. Their frontier poetry is electric, full of texture, and if we don’t always grasp the individual syllables—particularly from Jeff Bridges’ slurring Rooster—we always have a firm hold on the meaning.

When the film was released in 2010, it received overwhelming critical acclaim, but the consensus seemed to be that it just wasn’t a Coens film. Roger Ebert, in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, put it thus:

What strikes me is that I’m describing the story and the film as if it were simply, if admirably, a good Western. That’s a surprise to me, because this is a film by the Coen Brothers, and this is the first straight genre exercise in their career. It’s a loving one. Their craftsmanship is a wonder. [. . .] But this isn’t a Coen Brothers film in the sense that we usually use those words. It’s not eccentric, quirky, wry or flaky.

I find this sentiment more than a little puzzling. I opened this piece with observations on the film’s dialogue because it’s the most obvious sign that True Grit is anything but a straight genre exercise. There are very few films period whose scripts walk a similar tightrope between the vernacular and the poetic, much less Western films. But it’s more than just the words the characters say. What makes True Grit a Coens film is the even narrower tightrope it navigates: that of tone. The aura of the film is a mix of the heroic and the banal, the noble and the farcical, that is the signature of its makers’ oeuvre.

Joel and Ethan Coen are often painted as cynics whose creations feature characters for the purposes of pointing and laughing rather than empathizing. This holds true for a few of their films—Barton Fink is filled with a loathing for its protagonist that becomes more and more obvious as its story unfolds, and when I recently revisited Burn After Reading I was exhausted from the sheer contempt it holds for its entire cast. But more often than not it’s a reductive claim.

It’s more accurate to say that the brothers make films whose worlds point and laugh at their inhabitants but whose stories ultimately admire their characters’ refusal to give up in their struggles, futile or undignified as they may be. The titular folk singer of Inside Llewyn Davis spends the entirety of the film in a Sisyphean fight to break out of his rut, one that’s as funny as it is heartbreakingly cruel; but the movie ends on an astonishing note of empathy for its reluctant hero, who vents his demons in a song and—just maybe—opens up the possibility of breaking the cycle. The Big Lebowski takes an unholy amount of delight in hammering the junior Lebowski with break-ins, injuries, burnt cars, and dead friends, but in the end the Dude abides, taking it easy for all us sinners. The Hollywood of Hail, Caesar! is as far from meaningful as it’s possible to get, but when Eddie Mannix thunders to disgraced star Baird Whitlock about the sacredness of their business, you can see the Coens mean it as much as he does.

The best example of this cruelty overcome by affection is Fargo. Even those who have never seen the film are familiar with its broad satire on the Midwest—the thickheaded goodnaturedness of its inhabitants provides constant comic fodder throughout the movie’s runtime. More than that, Joel and Ethan take active glee in wresting control away from characters who are determined that things go exactly according to their plans, particularly would-be criminal mastermind Jerry Lundegaard and his bumbling pair of kidnappers-for-hire. But the film possesses a genuine respect for its heroine, pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson. More than that, it refuses to poke fun at her Midwestern sense of decency in the way it does with others’.

There’s more to life than a little money, ya know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well. I just don’t understand it.

You get the sense that, even if the Coens don’t really believe this sentiment themselves, they want to.

True Grit is in many ways a stunningly cruel piece of cinema. The drab browns and yellows of its vegetation and the frequent drifts of snow that waft through its frames set the tone for its Wild West—elegiac, cold, and harsh. Attempted sentimentality constantly has the rug pulled from underneath its feet. Rooster caps off a dying man’s pious anticipation of walking the streets of glory with the advice not to go looking for his killer. At a public hanging, the two white men present are allowed to finish their speeches; when the lone Indian begins his, a hood is placed over his head and the lever is pulled. The undertaker in charge of Mattie’s father idly tells her that if she’d like to spend the night in a coffin, “it would be alright.” Hardly a maudlin or sugary moment is allowed to exist before being brutally cut short.

More than any of these little moments, though, it’s the central journey of Mattie Ross that often feels as though it’s actively punishing its heroine. Mattie opens the film coming into town to collect her dead father. When she attempts to recruit men to come with her and go after after his killer, Tom Chaney, she is met not just with rejection but contempt; LaBeouf makes crude sexual comments and Rooster steals her money before giving her the slip. Shortly after this, there’s a sequence that initially plays out like a standard heroic-Hollywood moment; Mattie, undeterred by the roaring river standing between her and the two lawmen, urges her horse through the water while Carter Burwell’s strings swell. As soon as she gets to shore, LaBeouf snatches her from her horse and spanks her; ultimately, she has to be rescued by Rooster.

When Mattie does get to Chaney, she finds to her vexation that he fails to recognize he has done anything wrong and greets her like an old friend. She manages to shoot him in the short ribs only after he instructs her in how to cock her gun properly; when she tries to fire a second time, the gun fails and Chaney takes her away. When our hero finally manages to bag her man, the recoil of the gun sends her sprawling backward into a pit filled with rattlesnakes. She loses an arm for her trouble, and Rooster rides her horse to death getting her to the doctor.

Nor is even this the last time the film twists the knife. A quarter-century after her arm is removed, Mattie, a spinster after all these years, receives a letter from Rooster asking her to visit him. She makes the journey. She arrives a few days after the ex-marshal dies of “night hoss.” All she can do is bury him.

The above three paragraphs read like nothing so much as a 19th-century book of Job. In isolation, this flat description makes it seem as though the Coens have an overwhelming amount of sadistic disregard for their protagonist. But what’s remarkable about True Grit is how much the opposite is true.

Ethan, in a 2010 interview, says of Mattie that she’s “a pill [. . .] but there is something deeply admirable about her in the book that we were drawn to.” And while the film portrays her in constant states of indignity or frustration, the viewer never feels a directorial delight in Mattie’s suffering. In many ways, she’s a fierier, more Old-Testament version of Marge Gunderson. She is hell-bent on judgment by violence, and will not see anything less for Tom Chaney than death—specifically for his murder of her father, not the state senator he shot under the name Chelmsford—but this bloodthirst comes not from any personal inclination toward violence but from a deeply ingrained sense of decency and justice. Just as the world of Fargo belies Marge’s conviction that a day can be truly beautiful, the world Mattie inhabits frequently punishes her for her unwavering principles, and works its hardest to show her that life is not as simple as what’s fair and what’s not. She never wavers, however, and if that’s a kind of blindness, it’s a blindness that the Coens respect, not the kind of arrogance or stupidity that draws their ire in characters such as Barton Fink or Burn After Reading‘s Linda Litzke.

The most profound marker of the directors’ affection for their heroine is that they ultimately do let her have her way. In both Portis’ novel and the 1969 film, Mattie fails to kill Tom Chaney. She fires at him and is flung back into the snake pit; he leans over the edge to taunt her, at which point Rooster disposes of him. It’s a death that’s anticlimactic, cruel, and the precise opposite of catharsis. If the Coens truly felt any sort of contempt for Mattie, they would have kept it this way. But in a change that is crucial to the ultimate tone of their True Grit, they let Mattie have her justice. She looks her man dead in the eyes, grins, and cries, “Stand up, Tom Chaney!” And as the realization of what’s to come dawns in Chaney’s expression, she pulls the trigger. Over the cliff he goes.

Mattie still plunges into the pit of snakes and loses her arm. Her victory is not easy, and cannot simply be handed to her without consequence. But she still gets a split second of unequivocal triumph before she takes that fall. Blind belief in justice is perhaps deserving of punishment, the film says. But in the case of someone like Mattie—a girl who is capable, intelligent, and determined to get her job done—it is also deserving of reward.

The 2010 rendition, then, is a cruel film that never fully descends into sadism. It’s a heroic quest that never allows its main character more than a few isolated moments of heroism. It’s a movie that walks a constant knife’s-edge of philosophy and tone, and a lesser director would have turned it to the mush that the 1969 film all too often is. But to Joel and Ethan, this kind of juggling is second nature.

True Grit is often overlooked in discussions of the Coens’ 21st-century output. It doesn’t possess the raw intensity of No Country for Old Men, the personal investment of A Serious Man, or the forlorn majesty of Inside Llewyn Davis, true. But besides the latter film, it’s my favorite of their movies, and I maintain that attempts to exclude it from the conversation on the basis that it “isn’t a Coens movie” are fundamentally misguided. Not only is it a Coens movie through and through, it could only ever have been that.

A genre picture it may be, but merely a “straight genre exercise”? Not on your life. (Stand up, Roger Ebert.)

Wild Card is a 2015 American action thriller film directed by Simon West, and starring Jason Statham, Michael Angarano, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Milo Ventimiglia, Hope Davis, and Stanley Tucci. The film is based on the 1985 novel Heat by William Goldman, and is a remake of the 1986 adaptation that starred Burt Reynolds.[4] The film was released in the United States on January 30, 2015 in a limited release and through video on demand.Wild Card was a "box office bomb", making only $6.7 million internationally against a $30 million budget.

I was originally just browsing in search of a film to help me develop my hooligan British accent, and would've passed on this if not for the spiritual 5th FIYH Goldman's name on it. This is apparently the second failed attempt at bringing this to the screen, both times as vanity projects produced by the lead actor. Burt Reynolds was the first to give it a go in "Heat"

Neither this nor the 1986 version focused (until the end) on the weak rich guy wanting to learn to be tough which was probably the nugget that Goldman was half-heartedly polishing in the novel.

The big sequence of Nick Wild's improbable run of luck at Blackjack, is followed predictably followed by the self-destructive total loss on the last hand. It's been done better in other films.

The fisticuffs are on-par, except so many frames are brutally excised from the film during the moments of contact that there must've been blood all over the editing suite.

Disappointingly, Tucci's blood pressure never rises above, "golfing for 9 holes," in any of his 3 short scenes.

On the upside, I've ceased to pronounce my 'atches, so mission accomplished.

]]>Mon, 01 May 2017 19:05:17 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2078&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2073&action=new
It was certainly a trailer for a movie. That's a fact.

What I know about this movie from the trailer:

1.) It'll be a movie2.) It'll likely be longer than the trailer3.) It'll probably be 24fps4.) It'll star J.K. Simmons5.) Cyborg has AT LEAST one line of dialogue6.) Warner Brothers successfully hired an editor capable of matching gunfire in the movie up with music.

I don't need to make this post super long other than to say "what the fuck, Rotten Tomatoes?".

I didn't get to see Doctor Strange in the theaters. Something something, toddlers. I impulse bought Doctor Strange on bluray because the reviews were stellar. Honestly, I didn't think it was a whole lot better than Thor.

Some key criticisms (spoilers):- Completely forgettable villain (as per usual with MCU films). Marvel has 13 or 14 films tucked under its belt and has yet to produce an epically memorable 3-dimensional villain. And I gotta say, they certainly don't start here. I'm glad Le Chiffre was able to take a break from trying to beat James Bond in a poker game to put some charcoal on his eyes and glare menacingly at Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton for two hours. He was so forgettable, I don't even remember the character's name. Cialis? Let's just say Cialis.

- To write Stephen Strange, they carefully extracted Tony Stark's character arc, surgically removed all that pesky charisma and character-building backstory, took away the iron suit and replaced it with a cape and tunic. This movie spends very little time really getting to know Strange and why he is the way he is.

- Mordo. I like the actor. And let me preface by saying I know nothing about the Doctor Strange comic books. But in this film, Mordo's inevitable turn to evil is toooooootally not earned. Not only that, but he's 100% right. His concerns about how we can't break the rules whenever we damnwell please because there will be consequences is not unfounded. And he's pretty calm and peaceful about that stance. He warns them sternly, but civilly, about this practice. In the end, nobody fucking cares and it never becomes an issue. Ever. Stephen wins the day by doing exactly what he shouldn't do and it never comes back to bite him. That being said, for Mordo to leave and have a falling out over this is completely understandable. For him to go evil and start attacking other sorcerers is not believable. There's no tipping point or direct connection. I'd have liked to see the stakes raised, and for him to lose someone he loved, either directly, or maybe even just as a result of Strange having to mess with time. But in reality, he was telling Strange not to play with matches. Strange played with matches, successfully lit nothing on fire with them, which prompted Mordo to embark on a quest to destroy everyone who has a pack of matches in their house.

- Finally, the score, man. I know, it's freaking MICHAEL GIACCHINO, he's the modern John Williams, right? Well really he is. His music is generally great. And I suppose if the main theme of Doctor Strange wasn't basically a copy of the main theme from the Abrams Star Trek it might be awesome. To Giacchino's credit, this very well may not have been his fault. This may have been Scott Derekson putting Star Trek's theme in the edit as placeholder music and ordering Giacchino to copy his own work. If that's the case, then Derekson's the asshole I guess.

Ok so, bottom line, it's an MCU film. Those are known for being fun, but not amazing movies with the exception of a couple. To the film's credit, it had beautiful visuals. Really that's about it.

So why am I getting so riled about this movie?

Because shit man, that bluray was like, 20 bucks.

]]>Thu, 23 Mar 2017 22:18:50 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2072&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2071&action=new
There's a separate grammar to movie musicals than there is to stage musicals—at least, there is to the type of movie musical that Disney makes. Classic stage musicals are pervaded with song. Many of them are almost/entirely sung-through—Les Miserables, Sweeney Todd, The Phantom of the Opera, etc.—and even those that aren't will have musical numbers peppered liberally throughout their runtime. In this type of musical, songs are the default mode of expression—not every song will be as important as every other, simply because there are so many of them present. They're not events in and of themselves, though some of them will contain events.

The musical format of the Disney Renaissance film, by contrast, weighs its songs carefully. Of the three animated musicals that Alan Menken and Howard Ashman collaborated on prior to Ashman's death—The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin—none has more than half a dozen songs, reprises included. This scarcity in and of itself would amplify the impact that each song has, but it's not the only thing that does. Every single song in Menken and Ashman's animated collaborations is designed to crystallize a specific emotion or theme that's crucial to its film's narrative. In Les Miserables, when a character sings it is because music is their default mode of expression; in a Disney Renaissance musical, when a character sings we had better pay attention, because something important is happening.

For brevity's sake, I'll confine examples to the 1991 Beauty and the Beast:

- "Belle"—the opening number. It establishes perfectly not only its titular character's nature and desires but the circumstances that render her unable (as of yet) to attain her desires and that will later enable Gaston to stir up a mob against the Beast.- "Gaston"—what the former track does for its titular character this one does for its own, and then some. Its initial appearance firmly cements our impressions of Gaston and shows us just how enamored of him the town is; its reprise, following shortly thereafter, sets off his transformation from boor to outright villain.- "Be Our Guest"—an explosion of color and kinetic motion that transforms the castle from solely foreboding to a place that has the potential to be wondrous and cause happiness.- "Something There"—basically the crucial song of the entire movie, as it ultimately has to convince the audience that Belle and the Beast are organically moving from adversaries to friends.- "Beauty and the Beast"—is almost equally crucial in that it has to give the final push from friendship to something more.- "The Mob Song"—brings the themes of bigotry and, well, mob rule firmly to the fore and completes Gaston's transformation into a villain.

Sure, it's pedantic of me to lay out what anyone who's seen the film already knows, but my point is this: every single emotional and thematic beat that builds to the climax of the 1991 Beauty and the Beast is embedded in a song. It's possible to remove a certain number of songs from a sung-through musical and still have its narrative as a whole stay upright. If you remove any single song from Beauty and the Beast, IT CANNOT BE A SUCCESSFUL NARRATIVE.

Why am I hammering so heavily on this point? Because the fact that those half-dozen songs are the emotional and thematic skeleton of Beauty and the Beast means that there's only a very certain way in which that film can proceed. Events have to unfold in a certain order across a certain timespan in order to match the emotional/thematic journey; if they don't, the film's narrative body doesn't match its skeleton, which is a painful place to be in.

Fortunately for all involved, the narrative totality of the 1991 Beauty and the Beast hangs on its musical skeleton pretty damn near perfectly. It's compact and it's balanced, progressing events just enough in between musical beats that we feel we've undergone a complete emotional journey without having had our time wasted. However, that's a really tough tightrope to walk successfully, and any deviations, no matter how slight, risk sending the film tumbling from on high.

So when I heard that the live-action Beauty and the Beast would be using the Menken-Ashman songs, I got nervous. Because there are really only two possible outcomes once you've committed to that creative decision. Either you follow basically to the letter the path of the 1991 film—in which case, why are you making a new movie at all? or you start to drift further and further away from your skeleton—which doesn't feel good and can leave you falling limply all over the ground.

I kept shaking my head the deeper into the movie I got, because the 2017 Beauty and the Beast has absolutely no idea what to do with its story beats. It already has a very narrowly defined path to walk in order to keep the beats that the songs encapsulate maximally effective, but it can't walk that path because it's trying to simultaneously ape its source material in order to trigger audience nostalgia AND to be its own thing. And rather than take a look at how important, how fucking crucial, the narrative structure of its source material is, and realize it has to either confine itself solely to that structure or drastically rethink how it's going to approach this remake, the film makes the worst possible compromise and tries to be "its own thing" by stretching its namesake's 84 minutes to 129 and trying to shove additional material into that extra space.

Now, even just shoving simple filler in between song-beats would be enough to collapse the movie. Those songs depend on a very precise rhythm in order to be effective, and interrupting that rhythm with longer lengths of time dilutes its power just as much as if you were to take your favorite pop song and insert random blank spaces between every few drumbeats. But what Beauty and the Beast does is even more disruptive than that. Rather than simply injecting blank spaces into a pre-existing drum track, it starts running its own track on the off-beat, to fully complete this strained metaphor. It starts duplicating beats that have already been covered in the original narrative structure, or it starts throwing in new beats without encoding them in songs. And it's just. Disastrous.

We've already seen (well, we're supposed to have seen—more often than not the remake is shockingly incompetent when it comes to eliciting the same feelings as its source material) everything we need to know about the relationship between Belle and the townspeople in "Belle" the song—that emotional beat has been hit, and it's time to move on. Instead, the 2017 film inserts an additional scene of her teaching a little girl to read, only to have her laundry upset by angry neighbors. This is immediately followed by another duplicate beat in which Gaston is in general a boor about this matter of uppity women's book-larnin', which already occurred immediately following "Belle." Indeed, Gaston is the source of subsequent redundant beats throughout the film—where the animated movie establishes his slide into scheming villain with the end of the "Gaston" reprise, this one makes the frankly baffling decision to have him delay this moment to follow Maurice into the woods to look for Belle, then again repeat his being a boor about Belle, only this time with Maurice. We then, finally, get the moment of his slide from buffoonery to villainy when he ties Maurice to a tree and leaves him for dead, but wait! Maurice escapes and returns to the village, so his rejection by the townspeople for being crazy can happen again and Gaston's turn to wickedness can also happen again when he turns his reluctant father-in-law over to the madhouse.

There is so little purpose to these repeated beats that it's frankly baffling that they made it into the screenplay—until we remember that the film needs something to cut to in the midst of new Belle/Beast material. The problem is, not only can the film not come up with anything better to do to fill this space than to repeat itself over and over, the new Belle/Beast material is equally as disastrous because it can't inject itself properly into the original narrative skeleton established by the 1991 musical's songs. The biggest addition to the B/B story is a long scene in which the two of them travel to Paris via enchanted book so they can come to the realization that each has suffered the childhood loss of a mother. This is intended to further strengthen their relationship, but it's a jarringly false note for a number of reasons.

First is that the enchanted book itself, which appeared nowhere in the animated film, is also nowhere in this film except the one scene in which it's featured, and it's so clearly a clumsy bit of handwaving by a screenwriter who couldn't find an organic way to work the information about Our Couple's mothers into the script that it's frankly insulting. More important, however, the emotional payoff of that information is nonexistent. "Belle" the song features no information about the loss of Belle's mother being an important part of her character; she is defined by her love of learning and adventure and by the opposition to her surroundings that this causes. The film doesn't alter the song to include her absent mother as something that's been important to her, and it doesn't add a new song to cover that information either. Not that the latter would have been all that great either, because then we'd have yet another instance of a redundant beat—we've already defined Belle's character, why are we doing so again?

Indeed, inserting a new song to cover an emotional beat is something that the film does later on, when the Beast has a long and angsty soliloquy after he lets Belle leave the castle. The instinct here on the filmmakers' part is closer to correct, because they've at least recognized that the connection between emotion/theme and music is important. But it still falls flat, because it's interrupting the carefully established rhythm set by the 1991 movie. As the animated film rushes to its climax, its rhythm increases pace, with the "Mob Song" following close on the heels of "Beauty and the Beast" to ratchet up tension in the viewer. The Beast's anguish is communicated through a single roar because there's no time for anything more—not only would his launching into a song be a more overblown way of saying what can be communicated through a wordless scream, it would stop the film's escalating pace dead in the water. The 2017 film chooses to have the overblown monologue for drama's sake, and in the process achieves completely the opposite of what it wants to.

The same thing happens in a slighter, non-musical manner at the film's emotional climax, when the Beast lies dying, the rose loses its last petal, and the castle's servants transform fully into inanimate objects. There's a fine balance to be maintained here—if you're going to show the servants losing themselves, you have to do so quickly before cutting back to the dying Beast in order to maintain urgency. Instead, in a microcosm of the problem that cripples its entire narrative structure, the film chooses to give each of the key servants a dying monologue of sorts as he or she slowly becomes inanimate. It's an artificial way of increasing "drama" and adding "difference" from the source material that serves to completely undermine the emotion it's trying to convey. The same kind of microcosm can be found in numerous instances within the modified Menken-Ashman songs, which are subjected to added dance breaks and dramatic tempo changes for no real reason other than creating more spectacle. All these modifications end up doing is, Simmons-like, beating a cowbell out of time in order to disrupt a carefully established sequence of building events.

There are many other things wrong with the 2017 Beauty and the Beast. Its singing is pitch-shifted to hell and back; its aesthetic is a pretty unbearably ugly attempt to combine the gorgeous Gothic animation of the 1991 film with a modern, "realistic" look; it exchanges Howard Ashman's lyrics for inferior replacements for no discernible reason; its screenplay is on a line-to-line basis a godawful travesty that's maybe 1% subtext; the way it chooses to kill off Gaston transforms the moment from a death rooted in the character's nature to a needless deus ex machina. And of course there's the remarkably and frankly appallingly cynical decision on Disney's part to take a character who is coded with negative gay stereotypes, claim they're making him their FIRST OPENLY GAY CHARACTER in order to gather clicks, and then reduce the only instant of his actually being openly gay to a literally blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot in the midst of the film's conclusion, thus simultaneously rendering that character a case of shitty representation and for all intents and purposes not really representation at all.

But for me the single biggest problem for the film, the one that completely undoes its ability to function as a successful narrative, is its inability to understand successful rhythm. On a moment-to-moment basis, it robs scenes of their dramatic potential and drags songs down to no real purpose; when viewed as a totality, it takes what was a perfectly structured movie musical and turns it to boneless sludge.

The phrase “style over substance” is pretty well bankrupt when it comes to art. In dealing with aesthetic mediums, style and substance are inextricable—the substance of Shakespeare would be nothing without the words with which he wrought that substance, the meaning of Under the Skin would be nonexistent without its choices in cinematography, to name but two examples. The people who have no patience with a film unless it’s plain and simple in its meaning—who would strip away all artistic artifice and just get to the point already—are the worst kind of critic.

In light of all that, I don’t want to write The Neon Demon off for being slight, because its artistic elements are second to none—its cinematography and score are easily the best of 2016 thus far. However, I can’t get over the nagging feeling that those artistic elements aren’t there for anything—or rather, they’re there for something, but that something is so slight and indeed banal that the grandiosity of the manner in which director Nicolas Winding Refn chooses to convey it is almost humorously arrogant. It’s there right from the opening credits, in which the initials NWR are prominently emblazoned below every title card—The Neon Demon is a work of art, but it’s also an ego trip, one in which the director’s ambitions exceed his profundity.

Refn wants the world of his film to be a sort of Mulholland Dr. for the new decade, a nightmarish hellscape that tears down the world of fame and glamour, but he possesses neither Lynch’s sense of humor nor sense of humanity. Mulholland Dr. is certainly ambitious in its goals, but it balances this with a midnight-movie atmosphere of schlock and absurdity that restrains its director’s artistic vision from becoming an Oh-So-Serious sermon. It also absolutely depends on its cast, especially Naomi Watts and her ability to perform a gradual slide from Stepford-wife-perfect caricature to damaged, embittered wreck. The Neon Demon, on the other hand, has absolutely no sense of humor about its increasingly absurd take on the world of modeling—its overlap with Hannibal in terms of subject matter and cannibalism-as-metaphor serves only to emphasize how important the black humor of the television show is and how much it’s missed here.

Worse than that, however, is its decision to spend its entire runtime with each of the characters in a relatively static, emotionless state. Elle Fanning is a truly gifted actress, which is why it’s so painful to say that her character, the protagonist Jesse, could have been played by anyone—the same goes for Abbey Lee, who was arresting in her supporting role in Mad Max: Fury Road and is utterly wasted here. Through a self-important screenplay and what I can only assume is Refn’s direction, these two and nearly all of the other performers are trapped into giving flat line readings and static smiles for nearly two hours. A breakdown from this sterility into something more human, or the inverse, would have made this stilted quality mean something emotionally—as is it’s simply dull. A movie that’s about the damaging effects of the fashion industry can’t begin with its characters at the same point they are when they reach the end, but that’s exactly what Refn does.

The only exceptions to the above are Keanu Reeves, who breaks type as an over-the-top shitheel who runs the motel Jesse stays at and is clearly very much enjoying himself, and Jena Malone, whose smile-plastered makeup designer does indeed mirror Mulholland Dr. in her gradual unraveling. They are bright spots in an otherwise joyless exercise of smashing the audience over the head with the rather banal thematic statement “The fashion industry will chew you up and spit you out,” this metaphor eventually turning literal in unintentionally comedic fashion. (I will note that more movies should feature lovingly shot necrophilia—the obnoxious people who’d spent the entirety of my showing talking to each other walked right out of the movie.)

All this said, I can’t give the movie anything less than a three-of-five rating, because while it’s undeniably arrogant and egomaniacal to pull out all the aesthetic stops on such a slight screenplay, pull them Refn does, and it’s glorious. Nathasha Braier’s cinematography delivers everything that the movie’s title promises, bathing each frame in frozen blasts of harsh blues and reds—one early sequence turns the film into a flipbook, colored strobes against a black background recreating and obliterating the characters’ visages frame by frame, and is nothing short of jaw-dropping. This pulsing frigidity is matched by Cliff Martinez’ synthesizer score, reminiscent of It Follows‘ soundtrack—simultaneously lush and dead, rich and completely artificial, it fully commits to sonically communicating everything Refn wanted to say with his screenplay. Art direction, production design, and costuming are, naturally, second to none.

The overwhelmingly good and the disappointingly bad collide to form a whole that’s by turns compelling and vapid, repulsive in ways both intentional and unintentional. One could argue that that’s the point—the film’s very shallowness is a reflection of its thematic concerns—but where American Psycho recognizes, expertly utilizes, and ultimately undermines its narrator’s banality, The Neon Demon is fully convinced of its own deep importance. What we’re left with is a mediocre screenplay filmed with artistic perfection, populated with actresses who at times elevate their material but are often directed into a corner.

I can’t write off The Neon Demon, nor can I give it a fully negative review, because it is one of the most visually and aurally engrossing movies of 2016. I only wish those arresting qualities had been placed within an equally arresting context. As is, it’s a tale told by an egomaniac, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing—but what entrancing sound and fury.

I would also be love to see a sidequel from the Soviet perspective, but I doubt that'll happen.

]]>Tue, 17 May 2016 23:16:58 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2026&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2025&action=new
A note to everyone: after replying to this one ( ), make a new thread about some movie that you love or hate or have merely seen recently. We're gonna throw a molotov cocktail at this board and give it one last chance to catch fire, discussion-wise.

Trailer:

Fun Non-Spoiler Scene:

How do you guys feel about this one? It's one of my favorites sort of by "default," despite me never really being in the mood to watch it; there's just too many wonderful moments and references. If you haven't seen it, solid recommendation, just as a matter of principle. It's a great chunk of history and it's well-presented, if not a little on the long side.

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A note about posting YouTube videos: YouTube links often start with "https" instead of just "http," and the forum hates that s. Remove the s, and make sure the video ID ("5tekGhkHgEE," in the case of the above scene) is the last thing in the link. Often YouTube will add shit to the end of the link, like perhaps it'll say "5tekGhkHgEE?t=5" or something, and you'll need to delete the question mark and everything after it.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tekGhkHgEE?t=5[/video]

The above code won't work; there's an "s" at the beginning, and additional "?" stuff after the video ID.

The trailer for Goodnight Mommy had me fairly excited. Here is a situation that, while not the most original horror setup in the book, could very easily deliver a genuinely unnerving experience, a mix of the family tensions of The Babadook or The Shining, the child-driven horror of Let the Right One In, and the in-broad-daylight isolation of The Witch. It’s calculated to hit those primal fears any child has experienced: being all alone and chased by a monster without a parent to help, or worse yet being chased by a parent who has become monstrous. And for the first act, the movie looks like it’s going to hit all those notes. And then, things begin to degenerate at a fairly incredible rate.

Spoilers ahead.

In terms of initial setup, the trailer is fairly accurate. Two boys, living in an isolated house in the middle of Austrian farmland, are greeted by a woman whose face is covered in bandages. She’s apparently their mother, returned from a cosmetic surgery of unknown purpose. But her behavior is different—where their mother was warm and loving, this woman is cold and harsh, and often mentally and physically abusive. As time goes by, the paranoia of isolation sets in more and more, and the boys are increasingly convinced that whoever this masked creature is, it’s not their mother.

The movie is completely unsubtle in its hints as to the mother-creature’s nature right off the bat. There’s a crucifix affixed to the boys’ wall that’s conveniently framed in numerous shots, and in a moment about halfway through the film, when the boys flee to town in an attempt to find help, they visit the local priest, the Catholic imagery growing even more obvious. The clumsy nature of this setup has either two outcomes: the movie thinks it is being clever in its foreshadowing rather than blindingly straightforward, or it doth protest too much. It turns out to be the latter—the horror at the heart of Goodnight Mommy is gradually turned on its head, the viewer’s fear for the twins Lukas and Elias slowly morphing into a fear of them and empathy for their antagonist/victim. The first of the movie’s two twists to be revealed—Mommy is indeed who she says she is, the torture the boys have inflicted on her in an attempt to get their real mother back all for nothing—while it takes the wind out of the horror sails, is built to with a fairly effective amount of viewer dread. One scene in particular, in which the twins strap the mother down to her bed and torment her in increasingly shocking ways, is masterfully played, our fear that the mother will reach out and seize the boys bit by bit supplanted by a stunned sort of revulsion at what they’re doing to her.

Unfortunately, the movie can’t support this well-drawn scene, nor can it support the entire twist that it’s built around. The reason for this could have been completely avoided, and it’s almost mind-boggling to me that writer/directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala left it in the film. But they did—it even shows up in the trailer. And because of these thirty seconds or so of footage, Goodnight Mommy completely collapses.

It’s near nightfall. The mother, having recently thrown a tantrum in front of her children, wanders into the woods outside the house, shedding her clothes and walking naked through the trees. Odd, but not inexplicable—until her head begins to vibrate, whipping itself back and forth at a CGI-assisted speed clearly impossible for a mundane human being to achieve. This, coupled with the crucifix imagery, would seem to suggest that, if not a demon, something supernatural must be at work here.

Except…there isn’t. And the movie doesn’t even attempt to offer an explanation as to what the hell the forest scene is supposed to mean as a result.

One of the things that pleases (and frightens) me the most about The Witch, which has a similar and far more disturbing scene of a naked woman wandering alone through the woods, is that it doesn’t even think of pulling the all-too-easy trick so many horror movies do of trying to have their cake and eat it too in regards to the supernatural. The early sequence of the titular witch carrying baby Samuel back to her den, startling in its flouting of the generally accepted tenet that showing one’s monster should be reserved for the third act, firmly shuts down the internet-popular mode of interpretation that relegates every horror movie to the protagonist’s delusions whether that approach is warranted by the film or not. By contrast, The Babadook is an excellent example of taking that tired critical approach and making it work thematically. The monster can be either real or the product of the grief-driven psychosis of the film’s characters; the film’s central metaphor remains the same regardless of which approach is taken, and neither reading diminishes the horror at its core.

Goodnight Mommy tries to make use of both these approaches, which results in a completely incoherent piece of work. Even if it had committed to The Witch‘s brand of horror and rendered the mother an actual supernatural entity, the scene in the woods doesn’t particularly add anything to the film; indeed, it rather scuppers the dread of not knowing, of questioning what exactly this thing that wears a human shape is before it finally reveals itself—the boys’ mother somehow changed? a human impostor? something altogether more unnatural? As it is, a scene that in that scenario would have been tension-draining is utterly crippling. The film wishes us to believe that the boys’ mother always was just that, no alterations whatsoever. However, in having us do so it has to hope we’ve forgotten entirely about her supernatural jaunt. If the directors had rendered it as a dream sequence, something that the boys in their paranoia experience as a nightmare, it could have worked. No such trappings are wrapped around it, however. The movie is broken, and no attempt is made to fix it.

The supremely frustrating thing about all this is that the sixty seconds of screentime that the movie-breaking scene consists of could have been cut entirely without affecting anything. No information of any importance is conveyed, and the film would arguably be scarier without it, the ambiguity of the mother walking off into the dark woods alone far more unsettling than our seeing what she does there. Plenty of Christian imagery is littered throughout the next forty minutes, meaning the demonic red herring is viable without firsthand “proof.” And if the scene was shot for a misleading trailer, which is entirely possible—well, that’s exactly the sort of thing one leaves on the cutting room floor, isn’t it?

And so, the movie collapses in on itself. And while this complete lack of sense-making is its biggest flaw, it’s far from the only one. The third act increasingly relies on silliness in order to move the plot along. A pair of bumbling Red Cross workers take it upon themselves to enter into the family’s seemingly abandoned house and venture upstairs to look for inhabitants simply because the door was unlocked, resulting in a three-minute scene that accomplishes nothing and whose nonsense takes the viewer out of the film. More egregious is the film’s second twist—one of the twins has actually died, and the other in his madness has been hallucinating his presence. A comparison to Fight Club isn’t flattering—that film’s twist is integral to the plot, and the viewer is given a solid twenty minutes to acclimate to the Durden/narrator connection as part of the story they’re being told. Goodnight Mommy, on the other hand, shoves the twist in at almost the last possible moment, its rushed reveal a testament to the fact that the movie really doesn’t need it there. The viewer’s reaction at this point is not one of wonder or appreciation but of tired contempt.

Paradoxically, this flaw of silliness is balanced by a flaw of grimness. The film’s third act largely descends into torture porn, as the boys perform a series of indecencies on the intruder-mother to try to break her spirit. There are some shocking bits and pieces here—one moment in particular, in which the boys crazy-glue the mother’s lips shut and proceed to slice them open again, had me looking through my fingers—but beyond that shock their intent is unclear. Seeing such acts committed by little boys inspires visceral discomfort, to be sure, but to what purpose? The film begins to feel like nothing more than exploitation, and as the credits finally roll the viewer’s primary emotion is deep disappointment mingled with frustration and disgust.

Oddly enough, The Descent, which as of this writing I’ve just watched for the third time (for my family it was the first, and their reactions will certainly feature into my planned analysis of the film), contains far more violence per minute of screentime than Goodnight Mommy, violence far more extravagant in terms of blood spilled and lives ended. And yet it doesn’t feel nearly as exploitative. Perhaps it’s because that film is so perfectly constructed, whereas the flaws in this one are so egregious they encourage the viewer to poke and prod for more. Perhaps it’s because that movie has a lot to say (in a comparatively subtle way) about grief and the titular descent into despair that follows, where this one could say a lot about the mutual fears of parent-child relationships but chooses instead to descend into melodrama and ridiculousness. Either way, a comparison between the two proves that an over-the-top level of gore is not inherently in bad taste; it’s all in how you use it, and Goodnight Mommy doesn’t seem to be interested in using it as much more than a way to keep the audience involved with a shoddily constructed descent into not madness but absurdity.

There are glimmers of greatness in Goodnight Mommy, which makes it worse than if it were simply a consistent display of hackdom. It’s tastefully shot, and its three-person cast of Susanne Wuest and Elias and Lukas Schwarz does an admirable job, the boys in particular easily joining the ranks of excellently-rendered creepy children in the annals of horror film history. And individual moments—Elias’ nightmare of slicing his mother open only for cockroaches to pour out, the aforementioned transferring of sympathies from children to adult—are incredibly effective. It’s all the more a shame, then, that the film’s writer/directors couldn’t elevate the rest of its length to meet these moments in quality. Goodnight Mommy has gotten a fair amount of critical praise, with some going so far as to place it among fellow candidates The Babadook, It Follows and The Witch as one of the best horror films of recent memory. I’ve a feeling that, while those latter three will endure, this one’s reputation will fade away ere long. Not only is it not really horror, inexplicable moment of supernatural antics notwithstanding, it simply isn’t built to last in terms of meaning, story, or sense-making.